


To Be Alone With You

by orphan_account



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: A Tasteful Fade-To-Black, Ambiguously Coming To Terms With The Fact That You're Definitely Not Straight, Anxiety Attacks, Brief Descriptions Of Violence With A Gun, Fleeing To Canada To Avoid Potential Murder Charges And Accidentally Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Getting "Married", Insomnia, It's A Real Fucking Doozy Ya'll, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Nightmares, Other General Factors About Being Unwell, References to the book, Running Away, World's Most Impromptu Roadtrip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 19:53:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9563921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “Oh shit,” he wailed, rolling his head back, the heels of his hands pressed to his temples. “Shit. This is it, Richard.”“Shut up.”“It’s over. We’ve had it. We’re going to jail.”“Shut up.” I said again. His panic, oddly, had sobered me. “We’ve just got to figure out what to do.”“Look,” said Francis. “Let’s just go. If we leave now we can be in Montreal by dark. Nobody will ever find us.”“You’re not making any sense.”“We’ll stay in Montreal a couple of days. Sell the car. Then take the bus to, I don’t know, Saskatchewan or something. We’ll go to the weirdest place we can find.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the Sufjan Stevens song, of the same name.
> 
> I recently finished TSH and was completely enamored by it but all I wanted was something a little less queerbait-y and for Francis to not be so miserable in the end, so I tried my hand at writing something. 
> 
> I also haven't ever been to Montreal before in my LIFE or really know anything about Greek as a language, so there's that. Thanks, google, for saving my life.
> 
> The story begins immediately after Francis and Richard realize that Julian has the letter from Bunny, but before Julian realizes that the letter is authentic.

Francis was leaning across the seats of the car, encroaching on whatever personal space I had. Desperately, frantically, he was searching my eyes. I didn’t know what to tell him or what reaction he wanted to find in me exactly, but I couldn’t pretend that the offer of simply walking away wasn’t tempting. Or that even, somewhere in the back of my mind, I hadn’t considered running away on my own before now. His hands came away from his temples. One hand clutched the hem of his jacket, playing with a loose thread. The other was aimlessly hovering next to the gear shift, closing and opening rapidly in his latest fit of anxiety. I tried to think clearly, think rationally, about how we would be able to survive on our own if we did leave. I wasn’t confident we could manage it gracefully, but there was a certain appeal about being lost in a strange place with Francis. 

I brought my left hand to his fidgety right, smoothed the clenched fingers out, and let our palms go flush against each other. It didn’t quite fit comfortably, but it didn’t matter. This made sense, in a way. His hand was cold, and mine was as well. His ears were dusted red, a shade softer than his hair. His brows were furrowed. Slowly, his fingers laced between mine. I ran my thumb across the back of his hand. It worked.

“No?” he asked. I tried to let the anxious tension in my shoulders go.

“Let’s get a change of clothes at least, before we leave.” 

—

We were both a bit paranoid while crossing the campus back to my room, worried to stumble across the twins, or God forbid, Henry, and end up having to explain ourselves. 

Francis pulled into the parking lot and didn’t turn off the engine. 

“Ten minutes.” He decided for me, he leaned across my seat and opened my door for me. “Ah, and bring any booze if you have it.” 

“Richard, I’m serious. Anything more than ten minutes and I’m frantic enough that I’ll likely take off without you.” I knew he wasn’t being entirely serious, but the threat made me itch to get moving anyways. Through the windshield, I saw him slink down into the seat, making it difficult to tell if there was anyone in the car or not. Did he realize that having the engine humming implied someone was in the car? I couldn’t tell. The sidewalk was empty as I jogged down to the doors.

Inside the dorm, I wondered if Judy Poovey would tackle me in the hallway, beg for me to come to one of her parties later, crying out that we never hang out while I was forced to ignore her, but her door was silent as I moved past. 

I realized, once in my room, I didn’t exactly have a bag large enough to hold enough things for such a long, impromptu trip. There was so much about running away that I wasn’t exactly sure of, actually. I guessed necessities only would have to do, given my apparent time restriction. I emptied my schoolbag onto my unmade bed; my Greek books and a few unfinished essays tumbled out into a pile. I felt a bit awful, realizing that in this act, we were also walking away from Julian. I turned to the closet and ripped my shirts off their hangers. Underwear, socks, another pair of trousers all ended crumpled in the bag. I tugged one of my thicker coats over the thin tweed overcoat I already had on. Scanning over the barren closet, my eyes fell across the nearly empty box of alka-seltzer in the corner. This was when I realized this was the spot where I stood when Francis first kissed me. His hands were deft when they took off my shirt, his lips soft when he kissed me. I remembered, vaguely, the taste of tea and his cigarettes. Charles’ intrusion felt like divine intervention at the time, but now I couldn’t help but wonder if that night was the part of reason Francis had chosen me to run away with him.

A quick look-over the room showed that I didn’t have any booze, but I did add a nearly full pack of cigarettes, an essentially empty journal with a few Greek conjugation notes written in it, a ballpoint pen, and my toothbrush into the cramped bag. Almost out the door, I barely remembered my passport. I skidded back to my desk, dug through pages and documents the school had given me when I arrived. I tucked the little book into my breast pocket. I left my dorm as frantically as I had entered it eight minutes ago.

—

Walking up to the car, I saw the top of Francis’ head poke above the dashboard as I approached.

“No booze.” I explained. “I grabbed my cigarettes, though. We can share.” I mentioned as I chucked my bag into the backseat, as if it would ease the pain of no alcohol. Francis let out a dismal cry at this news and dropped his forehead to the steering wheel.

“Okay.” He said as he pulled the car out of the parking lot. “We’ll have to stop by my apartment then. I need a nicer coat and my papers. I think I’ve some scotch that Charles left in the back of a cabinet.” We were already going fifteen over the speed limit as he spoke.

—

It was my turn to wait in Francis’ mustang, silent all except for the restless tapping of my fingernails on the dashboard. My neck was arched, trying for a better look up at Francis’ apartment window. It looked inconspicuous; there really was no trace that the boy who lived there had recently killed two men and was now fleeing the country because things were developing too complicated and too quickly.

Francis took even less time than I had, and returned with several heavy wool coats draped over one arm, a small suitcase juggled in the other, and the scotch peeking out from beneath the mass of coats. He walked with an even pace, trying not to draw any more attention than necessary. I got out of the car to open the car door for him.

“Thank you, darling.” He muttered, a bit breathless, as he dropped the coats on the backseat bench, and the suitcase on the floor next to my bag. I pretended I hadn’t noticed the term of endearment and it’s potential implications. He’d called Camilla and Henry ‘darling’ before, surely it wouldn’t have meant any different for me. I didn’t think about it.

We stood side by side, my forearm leaning against the car roof, effectively trapping Francis between the car, it’s door, and I. His shoulders dropped with a heavy sigh and he started blankly at the coats.  


“You’re sure this is a good idea?” I asked. He didn’t look me in the eye.  


“Richard, I know it’s a terrible idea, but if there was an opportune time to disappear, that time is right now.” His tone was deadly serious and hung in the air between us.

I dropped my arm. “So should I drive? Or would you prefer to?”

—

Francis ended up driving, insisting that because he’d been to Montreal once before as a teenager, he knew the route better than I. While this was probably true, I could have taken us as far as the highway would have allowed in any direction away from Hampden and I don’t think he would have argued. As the road signs warning of the Canadian border were popping up more frequently, I knew we were both worried. Every few minutes, Francis would use the inside of his sleeve to rub at his eyes. The drive had been relatively silent, until Francis announced he was pulling over right now. His voice was tight when he spoke, his words felt precariously balanced. 

It was late afternoon, and the sun made the sky glow with a bloody tangerine color.  


“Is everything… you’re alright?” I asked stupidly.

Francis opened his mouth to speak but immediately closed it. He shook his head and closed his eyes. He was silent for a moment, up until he broke down into a loud, wretched sob. He dropped his head down, red curls falling like a short curtain between us. His hands flew off the steering wheel and behind his head, his fingers knotting together tightly at the base of his neck. His wails made his whole body shake. I ripped my seatbelt off and stopped, because I had absolutely no idea what to do. He was hyperventilating. I leaned towards him, my hands bracing against the dashboard and clutching the wool shoulder of his jacket.

“Francis. Francis, you have to listen to me.” The sobs quieted to wet, messy hiccups.

“We’ll be okay. Somehow we will. We’ll make this work, alright?” Francis was still trembling but he nodded.

I watched him carefully, my eyes unblinking, for as long as it took to bring his staccato sobs back down to slow, even breaths. I was breathing with him. He was silent. He hid behind his own arms for a long time. Slowly, carefully, he lowered his arms to his sides. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken deep in his skull. I hadn’t ever seen him look so broken, not even when we killed Bunny. We were so numb and so shocked then. Henry had taken on the role of conductor so quickly that there was no time for any of us process our emotions like this. I couldn’t bear to imagine what Francis was like after the Bacchanalia. I felt terrible, for myself but even more so for him. 

“Richard, I don’t know what to do.” He confessed to me as the sun set behind a row of trees at the horizon line. Even with his eyes red and glassy, he still looked lovely. “I’m so frightened that Henry will find us, that we’ll get caught, that you’ll become angry with me and leave me here alone, that we’ll get tossed in jail, that--”

“Stop.” I had to interrupt him before the tears began again. I could hear his voice threatening to collapse again. “We’ll go to Montreal and get a hotel room. We can figure it out tomorrow. The others won’t even realize we’re gone until class tomorrow afternoon. Henry and the twins don’t know anything. Julian doesn’t suspect a thing yet.” He nodded numbly at this, his gaze focused at the sun lowering just out of view. He was quiet. 

“We’re doing the right thing.” I told him, sounding much less confident than I had hoped to seem. I wasn’t sure of anything I had told him, truth be told, but my entire being ached to say anything to make Francis feel at ease.

“Would you mind driving the rest of the way?” He finally asked, once the sun had set behind the line of trees, his words coming out in a croak. His eyes were still red. His profile was backlit by the headlights of cars as they drove past us.

“Of course not.”

“Would you mind lighting me a cigarette?”

“Of course not.”

—

When we swapped seats, I briefly ran my hand down the slope of his shoulders as our paths crossed in front of the car, in what I hoped was a comforting fashion. Suddenly, out on the side of the highway, I became acutely aware of the fact that we only had each other now, seemingly until forever. He sighed at the touch.

Francis smoked his cigarette with the radio tuned into a 50’s station and the window down when we reached the border. _Come Go With Me_ danced around us while I drove. Occasionally, he would slip the cigarette into my fingers for a drag while The Del-Vikings serenaded the evening around us. Francis’ eyes were closed and he was leaning against the window of the car. He looked exhausted. I was, too, but letting him rest seemed more important than anything in the world at the moment. 

“You can try to sleep, if you’d like.” I told him, turning the music down a bit. He shook his head.  


“Someone’s got to hide the scotch from the mounties when we go through customs.” He explained with a gentle humor.

Evidently, he did fall asleep before we had reached the border and the scotch remained safe beneath the piles of coats in the back seat. I showed a bored woman in a window our passports through the rolled down window. I assured her we were just dorm-mates (lie.) who wanted to get away from our college in Vermont (true.) for the weekend (lie.) on a trip to Montreal (true.) After looking me over, and noticing Francis asleep next to me, she told me to drive safe and let us pass into Canada without a moment’s hesitation.

—

As he slept, Francis would occasionally mumble; half sentences and word fragments, in English or French or Greek. What struck me about this instance, was when he muttered Βοηθήστε με παρακαλώ against the glass of the window. His breath fogging up the smooth surface. _Please, help me._

I kept driving. 

—

It was around eleven in the evening when I found a hotel in the city that was deemed acceptably livable and pulled into the parking lot. Did we have any money? I had barely $200 in my savings account. I don’t know how much Francis had, though I suspected it was more than I.

“Have we arrived?” He asked, his voice rough and still tired when I shook his shoulder to wake him.

“Scotch and all.” He smiled at this. 

“Let’s go settle in and have a drink, then. I feel absolutely miserable.” 

—

We ended up with a lovely room. Big windows on the second floor facing away from the road. The floors were wooden and stretched longways across the room. The downside was Francis had forgot to specify two beds while he had organized the room for us. I was bringing in our bags.

“I’m sorry, Richard, really. I’ll sleep on the floor or the couch instead, if you want.” I dropped the bags on the floor near the end of the bed.  


“There’s… more than enough space for the both of us.” There was; it was a queen with a heavy beige quilt. Francis looked relieved.  


“Now pour us some drinks.” I said, sinking into the overstuffed couch cushions with a sigh.

—

We had been drinking too fast; the bottle was nearly empty and we had only been in the room for a little more than an hour yet. The scotch had felt like poison as it went down, but after I felt warm and content. It felt safe, miles away from Henry and Julian. I had my feet tucked underneath me on the couch. My head felt light. I wondered how old this scotch was. Francis was laying across the bed on his back. He undid his elegant silk tie with the hand that wasn’t holding his own glass.

“I wasn’t serious, you know.” I looked over at him. “I was certain you would have said I was being manic, and that we could have stayed and handled the letter situation, or something else... responsible.” His hand waved a little in the air, gesticulating on the word responsible. His hand dropped across his chest and he turned his head at me.

“So why did you come along?”

“I’m not sure. It just felt like there couldn’t be an easy ending anymore.” He nodded.

“I don’t think I’d survive in jail.” He told me frankly. “I’d rather kill myself than go to fucking prison.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I’d string myself up on the window bars with my bedsheets or something. Borrow my prison wife's shank and slice my wrists sideways.”

"Aren't you supposed to cut down the wrist? Not across?" 

"I've no clue, I'm foolish enough I probably wouldn't even die properly if I tried." There was a nagging sense of melancholy in the air now. I wondered how long Francis had been vaguely suicidal, or if it was a new occurrence in his life. I thought about asking, but didn't. He sipped at his scotch and didn’t say anything for a long while after.

“Richard?”

“Yeah?” He sat up now, cross legged and barefoot on top of the beige quilt, his chest peeking through the unbuttoned part of his collar. His weight made the mattress dip considerably, and I wondered how soft it must be to have that much give.

“I want to apologize for that evening.” At first I didn’t remember which evening was in question. He smiled at my confusion. “When I kissed you, I mean.” 

“Oh.” The back of my neck felt warm.

“I know you said no on the boat that afternoon, and I really did intend to stop bothering once we cleared it up, but you were there and I needed something distracting. I felt so terrible and you were a bit useless at the time, it seemed like a good idea.” I didn’t want to rush him into telling me about this but I was so suddenly and indescribably curious about his side of the story. I wanted to know why it was me.

“I was just the most immediate person?”

He sighed. “Well, truthfully, yes. But, also, because you’re much nicer to look at than Charles is, and less frightening than Henry has been.” He sipped at his scotch easily. The woodgrain in the floorboards beneath my feet had become increasingly interesting to stare at. 

“Camilla and you feel like the only people who hadn’t ever wanted to use me for something." This made my heart ache, despite the casual tone he was speaking in. A cheeky grin broke out across his face. "Richard, you’re blushing.” 

He was leaning towards me on the bed now, one hand in the mattress to support the shift in weight, the other still holding his drink in the air. The same sly grin he wore when we first met creeping across his cheeks. His rims of his pince-nez glimmered in the yellow lamp light of the room.

“Am I?” My palms were sweating.

_“Cubitum eamus?”_

The scotch made my thoughts a bit slow. I tried to recall where I had heard that phrase before. Francis set his glass on the floor and held a hand out, beckoning me, and then it clicked. _Come to bed with me?_ This was first thing he had ever said to me.

Moving off the couch and stumbling into his open arms felt right; it felt as if it this was the most sensible thing I had done in the past few months. Somewhere in the process, my own glass ended up at the foot of the bed on the floor.

“You’re sure?” He asked me, his hands moving to undo the top buttons of my shirt.

“No, I’m not. It makes sense though, in a way. I’m a bit drunk.” He smiled at this, the edges of his mouth turning up ever so delicately. The scene felt familiar. I, faint, dizzy, and doped up on something; Francis, seemingly elegant and collected and unbuttoning my shirt for me with an affectionate smile. I untucked my shirt and he brushed it off my shoulders. Stripping out of my trousers was an entire ordeal to tackle independently, I decided. I hoped he didn't notice how red my face felt as I tripped over myself. I tried to be as graceful when I helped him out of his own shirt afterwards, but we both had a fumbling moment of drunk confusion with the third button. He finally batted my hands away with a laugh.

“Stop. You’re incapable and I’ll feel too giddy otherwise. We’ll just sleep tonight instead.” 

This made me feel better, less nervous. I fell flat onto the bed and rolled to my side. The clean scent of the bedsheets became intoxicating. Francis dropped his pince-nez on the table with a small clatter. He twisted to turn out the light next to the bed, his spine moving perfectly, before he laid down next to me. Briefly, I wondered if it would be a grand and serious issue if we slept facing each other; if it would be too much, just a bit too quickly. In the dark, between the folded sheets and that beige quilt, Francis’ nose bumped against mine. I felt his breath puffing warmly against my skin. I still remember exactly how the bed shifted as he drew his knees up between us and how his feet just barely brushed against the inside of my calves. 

“Your toes are like ice.” I whispered. I wondered if he was thinking about the night he arrived at my door without his shoes on as well.

“It’s my poor circulation, you know, I had meant to go to the doctor’s office next week about it. Certain murder related issues came up instead.”

“We’ll stop by a doctor for you soon, then.” I promised. I was very tired.

He hummed again. I fell asleep while our combined weight made the mattress dip so much that we fell just a bit closer together.

—

In the middle of the night, or perhaps the beginning of the morning, I woke up flinching from a nightmare. I can’t recall what had happened exactly, besides the overwhelming panic I felt while running up a fire escape stairway, trying to outrun a looming, massive shadow that threatened to engulf me if I stopped moving. In the dream, I had missed a step and lost my footing, and fell backwards into the darkness beneath me with my arms spiraling out behind me like a windmill. 

My chest was coated in a thin layer of sweat that made me feel ill and feverish. I was desperate for a glass of water. I was only barely aware of Francis’ arm draped protectively across my abdomen as he slept. His brow was furrowed and he was frowning even as he slept, his long eyelashes decorating the tops of his cheeks. I wished I could smooth the creases out and make them disappear from his freckled face. 

Slowly, carefully, I moved his arm aside so I could sit up. My vague reflection in the large windows stood out against the night sky outside, like an inverted silhouette. Watching that version of myself, the me blurred behind the glass, stare back made me feel as if I had become a ghost. Perhaps that Richard was the version of myself I left behind in Hampden. Perhaps, we would have to adopt new identities. Perhaps, Francis and I could become better people. It was impossible to say.

He shifted beneath me, and regardless of if he was conscious or not, Francis pulled me back down to the bed. I spent the hours until dawn laying still, watching his profile, and listening to his deep, even breaths until the sun rose again.

Francis woke up before eight, with his face buried in the junction between my neck and shoulder. 

“Morning.” I told him, fondly, as he rolled off of my chest.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to sleep on you.” He sounded groggy and rubbed at his eyes. His arm fall across his face to block out the morning light streaming through the windows now.

“It’s alright. I wasn’t sleeping very much anyways.”

“Oh, God!” He shot up and stared at me like I was crazy. His hair was messy, and sticking up in every direction I had never seen it go before. Even in the early mornings at his home in the summer, he was always groomed and handsome compared to the rest of us, barely awake and hungover in our pyjamas. “You let me be a dead weight on you all night while you were _awake_?” He seemed so genuinely upset about this, I couldn’t help but laugh at how absurd it was. Compared to the issues of the past few weeks, this seemed so insignificant.

“Richard, I’m serious!” 

“I really didn’t mind.” I insisted. 

“Oh, you’ll end up being furious with me, I know it. I’m going to make you think I’m leading you on like this.” Francis’ ears were red again, his hands hiding his face. Before I replied he rolled to get out of bed. 

“I’m not mad, Francis.” He nodded and picked our shirts off the floor. He tossed one of them at me over his shoulder. I didn’t think it was mine; the fit around the shoulders was a bit tight on me, but it didn’t seem the right moment to comment on that. 

“Let’s go get breakfast.” He decided, not daring to look at me. The highest points on his cheekbones were dusted pink.

—

Montreal was lovely, for what I saw of it. We had a cup of tea together in a busy cafe for breakfast. Francis ordered Eggs Benedict for us both, which was delicious, and we didn’t speak at all. Our silence was comfortable next to the sleepy, busy French conversations around us. He would smile and translate what the people around us were gossiping about for me. We spent most of the morning walking side by side down the crowded downtown sidewalks. The air was cold, and I was glad for the extra coats we had taken with us.

“Feels a bit like a vacation, you know.” He told me as we walked. I agreed. 

“If we really never go back to Hampden, it’d be nice if things always felt like right now, you know.” 

“Right now is a bit stressful, still. We’re just avoiding it.”

“You know what I mean.” He bumped his shoulder into mine playfully while we turned a corner. I smiled at him, because I did know. How idyllic would life be if it was just the two of us, marching comfortably together down the streets of Montreal until we were old?

“Do you remember what day it is?” He asked, casually, with his breath clouding in front of him before dissipating in the morning sunlight. We were standing on a corner then, waiting for the pedestrian light to change.

“Sunday, I think.” The sky was clear and bright. A good start for a new beginning, I thought.

“You wouldn’t mind if we visited the Basilica for a bit?”

I figured he wanted to make it to the weekly mass. I remember Camilla had told me that Francis was raised with the same religion as she and Charles were. We both knew the topic of our uncertain future was being avoided, but for the moment, it was fine. The light turned in our favor, and we walked across the street.

“Of course not.”

—

The Basilica was massive and beautiful; despite my hesitant sense of atheism in my beliefs and actions, it was impossible to not feel the sense that perhaps something greater than ourselves was in charge. The ceilings, arched and glimmering with gold, stood proudly above us, reaching towards the heavens. Francis and I sat together in a pew near the back of the church. I did not necessarily listen to the service that morning, but I enjoyed being there. I enjoyed the comfortable presence of Francis leaning into my side. I enjoyed the electric blue light radiating from behind the pipe organ, and how it reflected upon the gilded walls. I’m unsure of how long the service was, or even what it was about due to most of it being spoken in French, but when it ended, I thought Francis stood a little taller. 

Before we made it to the exit with the rest of the receding crowd, I pulled Francis off to the side by the sleeve of his coat. There was a large, beautifully carved wooden door with a pair of ancient stone stairs behind it. The stairs were steep and I took them two at a time with Francis on my heels. 

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“I wanted to see the view.” 

“From the Bell Tower?”

“We’ll have be out of the city soon, it will be an interesting afternoon.” 

—

We had waited for the bells to stop ringing before we truly entered the top of the tower. The view was excellent, and the wind felt a bit stronger as we leaned out the windows of the Bell Tower, looking down at the road below us. 

“Do you suppose this is illegal?” I wondered out loud, mostly to myself.

“It might count as breaking and entering, but we didn’t break anything. Compared to our recent crimes, I’m sure this is fine.”  


“Class should be starting soon.” I told him. I could almost see Camilla reading at the desk, Charles making tea behind her and pouring a shot of whiskey to his mug as he thought no one noticed. Henry walks in on the scene and calmly demands to know where Richard and Francis are. Charles says he hasn’t seen them at all. Camilla echoes his words. Julian comes in with the damned letter peaking out of the top of his folders, and asks how everyone is feeling, and isn’t it strange that the class seems to be getting smaller and smaller each week?

“I hope Henry rung my apartment a thousand times this morning.” Francis told me as he leaned against the cool stone windowsill. “I would love for him to have sat there all morning dialing my number over and over.”

It was dark in the tower, but the sunlight was beaming as it came through the windows. It left trails across the uneven floor and into the room.

“We can’t stay here, in Montreal I mean, for too long, you see.” 

I nodded.  


“I want to find a proper bus map and figure out how far we can go. We need to get to the strangest place for us to be. It has to be somewhere Henry wouldn’t ever think of. I’ll buy us the tickets, we just need to plan things out a little bit.”

The sunlight was woven through his hair as he spoke. It gave him a halo as golden as wildflower honey. He looked like a fine marble statue in the dramatic light, his posture and face agonized with his contemplations of the future. The moment suddenly felt very beautiful and very baroque.

“Francis?” He turned to me, his eyes wide and clear behind his pince-nez. “I’m going to speak plainly because it’s just going to be the two of us, as far as I can tell, for a very long time. I think I really want to kiss you right now.”

He considered my words briefly, never once dropping eye contact. “I wouldn’t stop you, if you did, Richard.” 

So I did. I moved to close the distance between us. He was still leaning out of the Tower’s windowsill on his elbows, looking up at me. He reached up, cupping my cheek gently before his fingers moved to the base of my neck. The pads of his fingers carded delightfully through my hair and rubbed against my scalp. I tilted my face to the side so our noses wouldn’t bump. His lips were dry and he tasted like the bergamot from the tea we had with breakfast. It felt slow and sweet, and the sunlight was warm on our cheeks. He would pull away and I would go back in, placing a thousand light kisses against his lips. It was very chaste, and then suddenly it wasn’t; he was biting gently at my bottom lip and my heart was beginning to race. I felt his mouth turn up a smile against mine, and he pulled away once more with his eyes sparkling. I didn't follow after him. I hadn’t realized this had gone on long enough for my chest to feel empty of air when we had stopped.

“And here, I thought you would have only been alright at kissing when you’re drunk.”

“It’s one of my unappreciated talents, I think.” He grinned madly and stood up properly. He began to walk away from the window but held his hand out, waiting to take mine in his.

“Would you like to head back to the hotel before dinner?”

"I'd love to."

I don't think either of us realized it in that moment, but I was entirely willing to simply follow him off the ends of the earth, if that's where he wanted to be. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There really is a geniune plot to this story besides Richard and Francis falling in love, I promise. It sort of begins to show up in this chapter. 
> 
> I do speak French, unlike Greek, so the first half of this chapter was just me having fun.
> 
> The songs mentioned in this chapter, if you were curious to listen, were 'You're Getting To Be a Habit With Me' by Frank Sinatra, 'One and One Is Two' by Mike Shannon & The Strangers, and Liebestraum in A-flat Major by Franz Liszt.

We were intercepted on our way out of the Basilica. An older woman, who obviously was a staff person of some sort, began questioning us. She spoke so fast I could hardly keep up with what she was asking us, but Francis, always much more eloquent than I, spoke to her (“Honnêtement, Madame! Nous étions juste à la recherche de la toilette. Nous ne sommes que des touristes, pardonnez-nous!”) while I tugged the the back hem of his jacket like a child, trying to pull us away from the scene. When we escaped with a firm scolding, it was early in the afternoon, but the sun seemed much lower in the sky than it should have been. 

“Your accent bleeds into your French, did you know?” I asked him, grinning wildly as we stumbled away from the Basilica and back towards the hotel.

“My accent?” He was laughing. “Come on, I don’t have that much of an accent.”

“No, you definitely do. The Boston one? You lose it when we’re at school for too long but it gets prominent after the holiday breaks. When we first met, too. It makes you sound very refined, I used to think.” 

“Used to think?” His edges of his eyes crinkled while he smiled. 

“Your french sounds nice because of it now.”

He threw his head back laughing and tripped a little as he walked, catching at my sleeve to stay upright. “Please, keep talking about me, Richard. I love it.”

We walked into the front doors of the hotel, grinning and purposefully sticking close to each other’s sides. We almost made it to the elevators before Francis was called after by the concierge behind the desk (“Pardon-- Monsieur? Mr. François Abernathy?”) He shot a confused glance over at me over his shoulder while he met the concierge in the middle of the lobby. 

“Uh, yes? Oui? Puis-je vous aider?”

“Monsieur, vous avez eu un appel téléphonique de l'Amérique que vous étiez parti.” Any sense of the easy, comfortable feeling he had left Francis almost instantaneously. His shoulders tensed and in my mind, I was begging him to not to give anything suspicious away about us through body language alone. I don’t think the concierge even noticed the slight change in his posture, but I did.

“Y avait-il un message?” 

“Oui,” the concierge held out a folded note and Francis took it with a steady hand. It slid into his pocket. “Bonsoir, monsieur.”

“D’accord. You too.” Francis said dumbly as he turned on his heel towards me. He mouthed the stairs at me and jerked his head towards the stairwell on the far end of the lobby. I waited for him to catch up to me, and we quickly walked up the steps together. 

“What the hell was that?”

“Someone called the hotel asking for me earlier. They left a message.”

“What does it say? Was it Henry?” I felt a pit of anxiety simmering low in my stomach. I wondered what happened to our group dynamics that now made us both so inherently afraid of Henry. We almost feared Henry’s reactions to our hasty leave more than the potential of being caught by the police. I longed for the summer afternoons where Henry would row us around on the lake near Francis’ house with his sleeves rolled up, when he would softly read Homer out loud to me at dawn on the front porch, when he would help Camilla make dinner for us all on Sunday evenings, when he would bring me coffee on the mornings I was particularly hungover. It felt now, if he could catch Francis and I, we would almost certainly become the newest strikes on his ever-growing body count.

“I don’t know. Oh, God, I didn’t read it yet. I don’t know. Should I? Read it now?” His whispers were harsh and beginning to take on the frantic tone he tended to have when he was overwhelmed.

“No, no, no. Wait until we’re in the room.” 

“Right.” He kept his eyes forward, and he wasn’t next anymore. We walked as separate beings and I felt unsettled. We marched towards the end of the hall with a cloud of guilt hanging above us, a distance between us, and the room key digging grooves in the palm my hand.

I locked the door behind us and Francis pulled the note out of his pocket, swiftly unfolded it, and began reading. His eyes scanned the page quickly, and then he sighed dramatically, relieved, and I truly thought he was about to cry. 

“It’s from Camilla.” He told me with a sigh.

“How did she--?”

He began reading the note out loud, his voice shaking just a bit. 

“Shut up for a moment. ‘Francis; I hope you come back, but I understand if you don’t. H and C are furious. I will not tell them, do not worry. Please be safe, please do not forget me. Call if you can.  
Love always, Millie’.”

“How did she figure out?” Her brilliance always astounded me, but I couldn’t fathom how she could have discovered us so soon. Francis’ face fell and the note slipped from his hands to the floor. 

“I would joke with Charles and Camilla that I’d go to Montreal to get away from my mother, she probably just called all of the hotels in the city and hoped for the best. Oh, God, Richard, I’m so fucking stupid! We have to call her!” He reached for the telephone next to the couch. 

I grabbed his wrist, the wool of his sleeve folding beneath my grasp. “Not from the room, we’re not.”

“Richard, we can’t leave her in the dark. With us gone, she doesn’t have any allies in this horrible game now. Henry’s so obsessive and you know exactly how badly Charles will treat her if no one holds him back. She won’t tell on us, I know she wouldn’t.” His eyes were desperate, and I remembered the almost familial closeness and trust that Francis and Camilla always seemed to have with each other. 

“There was a pay phone down the street. We’ll call from there.”

—

He ended up calling and asking the operator to reverse the charges and long distance fees. One hand balanced the receiver carefully between his ear and mine, and I saw him glancing at me nervously from the corner of his eyes every few seconds. The phone kept ringing, and a brief flash of panic shot through me when I realized how high the odds of Charles answering instead were.

Blessedly, when the line connected, her delicate alto came through the line, instead of Charles’ harsh tenor. 

“Hello?” She sounded so hesitant.

“Oh, Camilla, darling, I’m so sorry.” Francis began. She made a whimpering noise as if she was crying, and my heart felt like it was falling out of my chest.

“Francis? Oh, is Richard with you as well?”

“I’m here.” I said too quickly, hoping my voice carried through to the receiver.

“Where are you both? Should I be worried for you? What’s happened?” She asked.

“We’re in Montreal, but not for long. We’re moving on soon so Henry can’t find us. Camilla, has he found out about Julian’s letter yet?”

“What letter?” She asked slowly, taking in this new information.

I pulled the receiver away Francis’ hand, “Bunny typed a letter to Julian before he died accusing us of the first murder and the plan to kill him. It was written on the back of some stationery from their palazzo in Rome. Julian believes it isn’t real right now because Bunny hadn’t typed anything to him before, but Francis and I are confident that he did write it. If Julian sees the letterhead, it’s all over.”

“He knows as well as anyone where they stayed on that stupid trip.” Francis added. Camilla was quiet.

“That’s why you left, isn’t it? That’s why you weren’t in class today, you’re not even in the country right now. You were scared.” She sounded so disappointed and so relieved all at once.

Francis took the receiver back, “We panicked. We didn’t know what to do; we’re playing this entire thing by ear. We got out of town as soon as Julian told us.” 

“Camilla, you have to lie to Henry. You have to tell him that Julian told you about the letter after class, instead of us, and have him steal it away from Julian’s things and get rid of it.” I insisted.

“I see.” she was quiet after this.

Francis was looking at me as he spoke, his shoulders sunk and he spoke softly. “You’re mad, aren’t you?”

“I’m not, darling. I’m thinking. Listening for Charles’ footsteps coming up the hall.”

“No, you are mad. I can hear it in your voice.” 

“I’m lonely and upset, but I’m not mad. Calm down.” 

“Camilla--” Francis began. I took the receiver back, cutting him off. 

“Camilla, please pack a bag and keep it hidden. If Henry can’t find the letter in time, meet us in Toronto.”

“Toronto?” Camilla and Francis asked at the same time. Given a different circumstance, their synchronicity would have been quite charming. I looked into Francis’ eyes as I spoke.

“Francis and I will leave for Ottawa tomorrow, and be in Toronto before next week. That gives Henry enough time to steal the letter, and if he can’t do it, then Camilla, you’ll know where we are. You can get out too.”

“What if something changes?”

“We’ll call you every other night from a payphone to check in.” 

“Wouldn’t Charles will notice the calls?” Francis asked, his words directed at me. “He watches her like a hawk when he isn't drunk, you know.” 

“Camilla, When isn’t he home?” I asked.

“Give me a moment to think.” Her end of the line was silent for a moment, “It isn’t certain each time, but call in the evenings between six-forty and seven-thirty. He’s usually at the bar then, or with Henry, lately. He comes home blind and angry. If it rings more than three times, it won’t be me answering the phone. You can keep reversing the charges, I’ll pay them before Charles will notice. We’ll have to be careful.”

“Six-forty and seven-thirty, every other night. Three rings or give up. Alright.”

“Please, I’m begging you both, stay safe. Don’t be fools. I wish I was there with you now. I wish we could be in the summer house pretending it was alright again.” Her words reminded me of why I had tended to fall madly in love with her for hours at a time. 

“Oh, Camilla, I wish we had brought you along as well. I’m sorry, so so sorry. You be careful as well; keep an eye on Henry and tread gently around Charles. He shouldn’t get to take whatever he wants anymore.” Francis spoke seriously. I could only imagine what he was alluding to.

“I think he’s almost to the door, or someone is, I’m hanging up. I love you both dearly.” The line went dead before either of us had a chance to reply. Francis stared at the receiver in his hand, and then carefully placed it back on its hook.

“I guess we didn’t quite escape everything yet, then.”

—

We leaned against the brick wall outside of our hotel, silent and thinking. Francis’ face was outlined delicately by the streetlights when they turned on, making his eyes and cheeks glow with a faded yellow color. Pretty, I had almost opened my mouth the whisper this to him. 

“What’s even in Toronto?” He spoke before I could. 

“Not Henry, that’s for sure.” I told him. He scoffed. “The CN tower, I think. There will be a nice art museum, probably.”

“Good enough, then. I’m dying for a cigarette, do you have a pack?” I palmed my coat pocket from the outside, pleased to feel the rectangular box tucked safely inside. I reached inside the pocket and pulled it out. I held two cigarettes lightly between my lips. I kept a book of matches from a bar back in Hampden slipped between the cardboard and the cellophane of the package. I ripped out a match to light the cigarettes. It took a few tries to get it to spark, but burned brightly before settling down into a steady flame. I gave Francis one of the cigarettes after I had lit them and tossed the match.

“Your hands are nice.” Francis told me, suddenly. He sounded tired; tense and relaxed all at the same time. I took a deep breath and the nicotine rushed to my brain. It made me feel dizzy, but centered as well.

“My hands?” He nodded and took another drag. The glowing ash grew long at the ends of his fingers. Smoke curled around our heads and disappeared into the night air. I lifted my left hand slightly, twisting it around, inspecting it for any remarkable details, unable to find any. He reached over and turned it around gently, so we could see at the back.

“I like how your knuckles look,” He turned it over again, my fingers curled in a bit. “And how flat your palms are.” His thumb traced the longest crease that curved through the center of my palm. “And how the space between the joints in your fingers is a bit thinner than most people’s.”

“I suppose so.” 

I dropped my hand but he didn’t take his away from mine, so they fell between us. He laced our fingers together, his wrist underneath mine, and pulled our hands into the deep pocket of his coat. I’m sure to any passerby, we just looked like two boys on a smoke break, tucked together against the chilly air. Our black wool coats blurred into one as the sky grew darker. It didn’t matter if anyone noticed where our hands were because you could barely differentiate where he stopped and I began. I noticed then, that my overcoat was one of Francis’ extra coats, that the dark color of the wool matched his coat exactly, that I had been wearing it all day. I tucked my chin into the collar, and found it smelled faintly of him. My chest felt tight then, but I blamed that on the smoke that hung around in my lungs. 

“After this, we should find something for dinner.” I said. He nodded in agreement and exhaled a stream of white smoke from his nostrils.

—

We ended up in a quaint restaurant which boasted some kind of interesting take on classic French cuisine. A tired looking hostess lead us through the bustling tables to a smaller booth, near the kitchen. It was clearly the end of her shift. It was quieter back there. When she left, I took my coat and helped Francis slip out of his own, and laid the coats across one bench. I sat in the opposite seats and Francis sidled up next to me. He sighed and put his head against my shoulder.

“Just read me the menu, honestly.” He muttered.

“Are you hungry for anything in particular?” I opened the menu, careful not to jostle his head too much. I didn’t ask if he was as worried as I thought he seemed.

“Choose whatever you’d like, I’ll pick off your plate.” He pointed vaguely at the menu’s top corner. “The asparagus might be nice. ” 

A waiter came out of the kitchen with a tray of food for another table and stared at us for a second too long as he walked past. We both noticed the hesitant look on his face.

“I’d love a white wine, though.” He mentioned. He pulled his head off my shoulder. 

The tired waitress came around again, and took my order (rosemary salmon with lemon sauce, a side of grilled asparagus for Francis, two glasses, and a bottle of Chardonnay) while brushing loose hairs that fell out of her braid back behind ear. 

True to his word, he ended up eating a little more than half of the fish when it arrived. We shared the asparagus, and drank away our worries about the letter, about Henry, about Camilla, until we were both giggling at nothing at all and sending each other sly smiles when we thought the other wasn’t looking. Underneath the table, his palm was warm and solid on the top of my knee. We both had four or five glasses of the wine. He insisted it would be wasteful to have bought the whole bottle and not drink it. We paid the bill, wished the tired waitress a good evening, and walked back to the hotel with our feet slipping underneath us on dry cement. We would laugh with every stumble, and eventually I slipped my arm through the crook of his elbow, and we became much more surefooted. 

—

When we made it back to the room we were both still laughing, but at what, I can’t recall. I collapsed on the bed before I remembered to take off my shoes. My feet hung awkwardly off the end of the mattress. I closed my eyes and folded my arms to act as a pillow.

“Mind if I open up the window?” He asked. “I’m feeling a bit flushed.” 

“Go ahead.” The comforter muffled my words, but I heard him pad across the wooden floors to unlock the windows. A breeze of cold air came into the room and he took a deep breath. 

An interesting detail about our hotel room, was that there were no television, but a small AM/FM radio taking it’s place on a table at the far wall, where one could have easily expected a TV. I could tell I was falling asleep. I was vaguely aware of Francis moving towards the radio to fiddle with the knobs until the static cleared. He tuned into the beginning of a Frank Sinatra song and he began singing along quietly as the song played.

“I used to have a crush on Frank Sinatra, when I was younger.” He told me in the middle of a verse. I heard him moving across the floor again.

“I think everyone did, Francis.” I turned on the bed to smile at him. He was sitting on the frame of the window then, glass panes pushed out behind him. His head rolled back and forth lazily, happily, to the music as it played.

“Did you?” 

“ _Fly Me To The Moon_ was the most romantic song I had ever heard when I was, I don’t know, twelve or so.”

He smiled at me and got down from the window. He had come over me to tug on the collar of my coat, pulling me get off the bed. 

“Dance with me, would you?”

I was on my feet and he was grabbing at my hands playfully. The song had changed from the Sinatra song to something more upbeat.

“I don’t think I can dance, Francis.” 

“You’re from California, of course you can dance. It’s the motherland of lovely boys who can dance. It’s got to be genetic or something.”

I burst out ugly laughing at that. I hadn't even been to my dances in high school, but he had me spinning across the floor with him, delighted and lightheaded from the wine still, before I could continue to protest. It was another old song; I don’t know from when. It was filled with nostalgic lyrics about being in love with simple, sweet rhymes, just as every song of it’s type is. He tried to sing along, playing up his faces to align with the mood of it all. I don’t know how we looked bumping into each other as we went in circles around each other, but we felt fantastic. Francis began doing something resembling poor man’s version of the twist as the guitar in the song picked up, slinking to the floor and coming up again. I laughed so hard that my sides ached.

At some point, the radio died down to an orchestral piece playing at a low volume. We were on the bed again, Francis sitting against the headboard with my head on top of his thighs. The window was still open. His hand was resting above my heart.

“Richard, are you awake?” 

“Nearly.”

“You remember our afternoon on the boat, right? When I took us rowing?”

“Of course. I dropped the oar and you laughed at me. I said I wasn’t interested and you said you weren’t either.” I opened my eyes to look up at him. “What are you thinking about?”

“I was lying then, when I said that.” He was grinning down at me. “I don’t know why I lied. I don’t do well with rejection.”

“Oh?”

“Just to clear that up. I like talking plainly with you.” He brushed a piece of hair away from my face. I closed my eyes again. “I am interested, Richard, quite a bit. You’re not dumb. I’m sure you’ve realized that.”

“I might have been lying as well. I think I was frightened by the idea of it. Or being a part of it. I’m not really so brave, you know.” He was quiet.

“Are you now, still? Frightened, I mean.” His hand on my chest tightened the slightest bit, ready to move away if need be.

“Not nearly as much, anymore. I think that might have changed because it’s you, I’d be uninterested with anyone else. Does that make sense?”

“Just go to sleep, Richard. I’m glad you came with me.” His hand lay flat again, and I could hear him smiling. I put my hand on top of his.

“Goodnight, Francis.” 

—

When I woke up the sky was light, but the clouds were so overcast I couldn’t tell what time it was. Francis wasn’t next to me. I shot up in bed, and called his name into the empty room. I moved slowly, considering the panic that had started to streak through my veins, and got out of bed to inspect the room. His shoes and clothes were gone, but his suitcase still sat next to the radio against the wall. I tried to find a note, anything he might have left behind to calm me down. I spotted a folded note on the table, but it was the concierge’s looping handwriting of Camilla’s message, not the sharp and angular words from Francis’ hand. No, no, no, no. He wouldn’t have left, I knew he wouldn’t have. I slid into my shoes and tugged on my coat haphazardly, not bothering to tighten the laces or straighten the shoulders of the coat. I slid across the wooden floor and threw the door open to find Francis standing in the threshold, a paper bag under one arm, a takeaway cup of coffee in each hand, and the room key held between his teeth. I was breathing heavily but moved to take the cups out of his hand casually, as if I hadn’t just been ready to sprint down the hall and into the street looking for him. 

“Alright, Richard?” One eyebrow had shot up and he smirked at me, fond but confused. He put the bag down and closed the door.

“Yes! Just fine. Peachy. Lovely morning, you know.” I busied myself with taking the lids off the coffee cups and setting them on the table. I had put my shirt on inside-out again. The inner seams of my sleeves lay flat but uneven against my cuffs.

“You slept late, so I figured I would bring breakfast back.” I snapped the lids back onto the cups.

“What time is it?” I felt foolish for thinking he would have really left. I began to undo my shirt and put it on properly this time. 

“Nearly ten. I figured we could stay in a bit before leaving? I got a roadmap, as well. I think we could make it to Ottawa tonight without too much hassle.” He stood behind me, his palms warm and flat against my shoulder blades as I turned my shirt inside out. He smoothed the shoulders of the fabric out for me when I slipped it on. I worked at refastening the buttons. His head was leaning against the base of my neck and his hands went to rest at my waist. He was quiet.

“Alright, Francis?”

“You thought I left for good, didn’t you?” His voice wasn’t accusing. It was soft.

“I wasn’t sure. I hoped you hadn’t.” 

“I’ll leave a note next time.”

I turned underneath his hands and held him close to my chest. We were the nearly the same height, but his head was comfortable against my chest. I leaned my forehead down into his shoulder. I don’t know how long we stayed like this, just holding each other and not saying anything. 

“I don’t think Camilla will come.” He broke the silence finally. Our coffees was cold when we peeled away from each other.

“Why not?” 

“She’s too attached to Henry. She feels obligated to him, to Charles as well, to see this all out until the end.”

“We’ll talk to her tomorrow. Don’t worry about it right now.” 

—

The rest of the morning was filled with the quiet background noise of the radio. Francis sat sprawled on the floor while he plotted out the route to Ottawa, and then Toronto, and then wherever we were headed beyond that. His marker squeaked unpleasantly against the paper as he highlighted roads and alternative routes, just in case. I tidied the room around him and made the bed. While packing our things, I discovered the journal I had tossed in my bag. Francis was busy, focused on his own work, so I spent the few hours we had left in the room chronicling everything that happened to us so far. It took eighteen pages of writing before Francis asked me what I was doing. I was in the middle of writing about the radio from last night when I realized he was staring at me.

“Writing about us.” I looked up at him, and he looked back at me. Our eyes met in the fashion that eyes do. His face was blank but his ears were red. He nodded and went back to marking the roads. I went back to my journal.

 _There are many aspects about what we’re doing that I’m inherently clueless of. I don’t think Francis really knows, either, but there’s a sort of comfort in that; that despite being potentially lost and certainly alone, we’re together. I hadn’t realized how deep my visceral affection for our friendship-- or whatever we are now-- had truly ran._

“Are you ready?” He asked, standing at the door. “We should be leaving now.”

I closed the journal and tucked it into my bag again. I locked the door behind us when we left the room behind.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Told you I was still working at this, despite being sure there’s a grand total of five people who are interested! Thanks for waiting for this part, if you were; I go to art school and it is more painful than you would anticipate to find time for anything besides homework. I don’t know when the next chapter will be up, but it will likely be the conclusion to this little endeavor. I’m probably going to combine the chapters into one ~20k to ~25k beast after that, because I detest reading chaptered-fics. 
> 
> Also I’m going to keep tossing vaguely obscure classic rock love songs to appease no one but myself. This chapter mentions ‘Stand By Me’ by John Lennon and ‘Play The Game’ by Queen.

We left Montreal as a spot on the horizon somewhere between the late afternoon and the early evening. Francis was driving and I was playing along as navigator with his roadmap spilled over my lap and the dashboard. I traced our approximate location with a fingernail, telling Francis about his outlined exits and turnoffs miles before they were supposed to happen. He would gently scold me for making him think the route was changing too quickly. He would grin brilliantly at me sideways but he always kept his eyes forward. Briefly, at some point along the highway, I wondered out loud about how suspicious the Vermont plates might look to a typical Canadian driver. 

“Oh, God. Please, don’t give me any more things to overthink. We’ve got an hour or so left until Ottawa and I was expecting to drive it without my nerves getting the best of me again.” 

“I’m sure they’ll think of us as obnoxious tourists,” he glanced at me, disbelief traced across his face. “Don’t fret so much, Francis. All things considered we’re doing pretty well.”

His hands twisted nervously around the steering wheel. “I’m trying not to.” 

—

The rest of the drive went well; it was quiet until Francis started waxing poetic about the Hesperides and their power over the golden sunsets of the classical world as the sun sank below the horizon in front of us. We seemed to have had been chasing sunsets quite often, those past few days.

“Don’t you think it’s interesting how, essentially, some girls with a garden in the west kickstarted the entire trojan war? It’s incredible, how their carefree afternoons in the sun lead to so much destruction.”

“That’s a little bit of a parallel for us, don’t you think?”

He didn’t look at me, but I could tell he was remembering the days at his home in the summer. The line of his mouth drew taught while he thought. We stopped at a traffic light. 

“Maybe more than we realized.” He spoke quietly. I hummed in response. “Be a doll and turn the radio for me, would you?” 

I reached over and twisted the knob until the noise came clear through the car’s speakers. The only station that didn’t interrupt itself with an occasional, unsettling hiss of static was a local station from a college somewhere presumably nearby. An inexperienced voice of a sleepy girl went over a few announcements for some campus events before the next scheduled show began. The songs were romantic with a bluesy, classic rock feeling. Francis tapped his fingertips along to the beat of the first few songs, and a laugh escaped with my exhale when a familiar cover of _Stand By Me_ began to play next. Francis looked at me sideways, curious.

“What’s so funny?”

“This song could be a bit of a parallel for us as well.”

“You’re such a sap sometimes, Richard.” He was teasing me but at the same time, he sounded endlessly fond. I found my heart was aching beneath my sternum. “Just tell me how to get to a decent hotel, we’re about ten minutes away from the city, I think.”

—

It wasn’t so late when we parked. Halfway across the parking lot, Francis loosely grabbed at the elbow of my coat (his coat still, technically). 

“I just want to be clear this time.” His immediate tone of seriousness sparked a bout of nervousness in my mind. “So be completely honest with me, Richard. Two beds or one?” 

I was holding my breath as he spoke, expecting something much worse than that. His eyes were gravely serious. He wasn’t wearing his pince-nez today and I saw the golden brown in his eyes so clearly in dusk.

“Whatever you’d prefer is fine, Francis.” I felt breathless.

And so we ended up with another queen bed to share. Our room wasn’t as lovely as it had been in Montreal, but it did exactly what an anonymous hotel room was supposed to do. There was a rug with a Baroque pattern that looked like it had been bought in a strip-mall stretched across the floor, as opposed to the long wooden floorboards. The quilt was a deep olive green this time, with soft white linen sheets. I thought, faintly, that it would match Francis' complexion beautifully. We succeeded in having a small television this time. Francis helped me out of my coat, then took off his own, and hung them side by side in the empty closet near the front door. 

“You can have the bath first, if you’d like.” I offered to him, thinking he might have felt groggy after driving. I pulled my journal out of our bags and put it on the table beside the bed. He sat on the far end of the mattress and rolled up the white cuffs of his shirt to his elbows. He shook his head and glanced at me over his thin shoulders.

“You go ahead, I’d like to sit still for a while.” I saw him staring at the journal on the table. He called after me before the bathroom door closed behind me. He bit his lip while he asked.

“Mind if I read what you’ve been writing?”

This caught me a bit off guard for some reason, and I felt a warm flush creep up my cheeks. 

“I don’t see why you can’t.” I felt nervous then, self-conscious in a way that I hadn’t felt around him in months. He grinned like a devil and lunged across the bed on his stomach to grab at the thin book. 

“Promise I’ll finish before you come out again. I read fast.”

—

I calmed myself down in the bathroom, staring at my reflection while the stream of water from the shower got warm. The self-awareness of my appearance was suddenly a very pressing issue; I hadn’t been so concerned with it in Hampden, but now it seemed deadly important. Stubble had come in along the sides of my jaw and it caught on my fingertips as I scrubbed my face. There were circles beneath my eyes as dark as bruised plums that dragged halfway down my cheeks. There were permanent indents along the bridge of my nose from where my glasses had been sitting. Frankly, I looked terrible. I couldn’t recall if I looked like this all the time or if it was just the past few days. Briefly I allowed myself to wonder dumbly what Francis saw in me. In a vague effort to ignore my reflection, I washed my face and shaved haphazardly. I undressed quickly and fell underneath the shower when I realized how unfathomably gross I felt all over.

The bathroom had come loaded with pristine white towels of varying sizes. I used a washcloth to scrub my skin red and raw all over. The water was as hot as I could possibly stand it, and it seared against my back pleasantly. I turned the handle off, making the water run cold and frigid for a few moments before I stepped out of the shower. 

I had made the mistake of not bringing my night-clothes into the bathroom with me. I ventured out into the room, hair wet and plastered against my forehead, towel wrapped around my waist. Francis was sitting on the floor underneath the window legs stretched out and crossed comfortably at his ankles. My journal was open with one hand, and a cigarette glowed dimly at the end of his fingers. There was an ashtray he found somewhere in the room on the floor next to him. He scarcely moved to look up at me but I felt his eyes rake over my bare chest while I shuffled things in my bag around. He whistled, low and wolfish, as I pulled my pyjamas on.

“Don’t stare so much, Francis, it’s rude by most people’s standards.” 

“We’re not really ‘most people’ though, are we? If you were really so modest now you wouldn’t be grinning like a madman.” 

I grabbed a pillow off the bed and overhand threw it directly at him. He gasped loudly when it knocked into his face and fell against the floor. He tossed it back, and it landed squarely against my chest with more impact than I was anticipating. I dropped it in the middle of the bed on my way to sit next to him beneath the window. 

“What do you think?” I lifted the cigarette from his hand and he went back to reading.

“I think I wish we still had that radio.”

“I meant about what I wrote.” 

“You make me sound like such an enigma, I’m flattered. I feel like I’m Mr. Darcy’s less brooding cousin now.” He was smiling, mischievous and keen.

I took a drag off the cigarette. Smoke curled around my head lazily before escaping out of the open crack in the window.

“You’re more sentimental than I would have guessed, as well. You write like a knock-off Allen Ginsberg, darling. It’s lovely. I liked the part about kissing in the bell tower the best; very romantic. I always suspected direct sunlight always did wonders at making me look good and you’ve only confirmed my theories.” He leaned his head on my shoulder. I passed his cigarette back. 

“You always look good.”

He chuckled. “Even when I’m sobbing on the side of a highway because it turns out I’m the world’s most anxious murderer?” 

I wanted to kiss him again, then. I didn’t.

“Especially then.”

—

We went to bed early, realizing our past few nights had entirely been spent drunk and giggling into the early morning hours. I mentioned how I had noticed my dark circles, and Francis immediately began prodding my face, checking how bad they really were for me, apologizing for not seeming them beneath the frames of my round glasses.

This bed was firmer than in Montreal, and initially we laid with a conservative space between us, each on our respective sides of the bed. Sooner or later though, we ended up with our legs tangled together and my ear pressed against Francis’ chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. 

“At this rate, we’ll only be able to fall asleep with unfamiliar ceilings above us.” He muttered, staring into the dark room, his hand creeping around my shoulder.

“That’s what we get for fleeing the country. Weird hotel beds and unfamiliar ceilings.” I croaked at him. I listened to his laughter bounce around his ribcage.

—

I hardly slept again; it felt like I hadn’t in weeks and I wondered how long I could keep up going days at a time on only two or three hours of rest. I couldn’t sleep in Hampden because of the stress of everything. I had the same nightmare as in Montreal, only more petrifying and vivid the second time around. The difference was that on second time, Francis managed to wake me before I had slipped on the iron staircase, fell backwards away from Henry peering at me from the top of the steps, and consequently snapped my neck in half, the same way Bunny had. 

Francis’ eyes did not stand still, like he was unable to settle on a single part of me to look at. I had launched forward, sitting up in bed, nearly knocking our heads together in the process. I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t even want to speak for fear of my voice failing me. I didn’t say anything at all.

“You barely mentioned the nightmares in your journal. I didn’t even realize.” He sat up next to me, protective and nervous all at once. I felt like flinching. I might have, when he tried to come closer.

“I didn’t want to wake you up, the first time.” My voice cracked.

“You were nearly screaming, Richard. It’s nothing real, you must know.” I had to close my eyes to keep from crying in front of him. I wished I could hide but there was no where to go. _It’s only fair he sees you like this, as well._ I felt the weight shift across our bed while he leaned into me. 

“I’m right here.” He held my face with one hand. “Can you tell me what it was like?” The pad of his thumb rubbed the tears off my cheek. My lungs stuttered with a shaky exhale and I shook my head ‘no’.

“I don’t want to cry.” I told him. I sounded awful. The whole situation felt awful.

“Then try to sleep instead.” His fingers curled into my hair at the base of my skull and lowered us back onto the pillows.

I felt impossibly selfish for wishing he had told me _I love you_ instead. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. I suspect that Francis didn’t, either.

—

We didn’t get to wander around Ottawa nearly as much as we did in Montreal; we stayed in our hotel room trying to enjoy the simplicity of the lull in action. We didn’t get to call Camilla until this evening and neither of us felt like exploring the city, so we stayed close to the hotel. 

In the morning, we went to cafe of sorts. Francis ordered me a cup of coffee (“You look like the living dead, Richard.”) and a matching mug of black tea (“Darjeeling is good for my nerves.”) for himself. We hid away in a back corner next to an exposed brick wall. The cafe was warm inside and I found myself nearly drifting off more than I had expected, which was not at all..

“Do you suppose we should do something productive?” He asked me, palms curled around the warm sides of his mug. The toe of his shoe rubbed gently up and down the inside of my calf underneath the table.

“Like what?”

“Laundry, I was thinking.” I hadn’t been expecting that. “We’ve only about two outfits each. It’s got to be unhygienic after awhile, you know.”

Bits of coffee grounds floated lazily around the bottom rim of my cup in a crescent shape. I wondered how much longer until the caffeine would work. 

“I saw a coin-op laundry down the road a bit.” He said quietly while he drank the rest of his tea. “It might be nice to have clean clothes again.”

—

So we spent the afternoon mostly unclothed under rows of tacky fluorescent lights. Francis was prodding at the machine buttons curiously while I perched, shirtless, on top of the dryer. I half wondered if Francis had ever been in a coin-op laundry before that day. He seemed to be acting like he knew what he was supposed to do, but he wasn’t a spectacular actor by any means. 

“Do we have more change?” Francis stood confident and determined on the linoleum tile, wearing nothing but his briefs (black, like the rest of his wardrobe) underneath his wool coat and a silk scarf. I slipped my hand into my trouser pockets and came up with nothing. There was a crackling speaker system in the laundromat with music playing; Freddie Mercury’s velvet voice purred at us alongside a piano from the nearest speaker.

“Don’t believe so.” My chest was bare and I was endlessly thankful I still had a pair of clean pants to wear. I leaned against the wall next to our machine, feeling exhausted, not for the first time that day.

“Damn. I think we’re fifty cents short for the dryer then.”

“There’s a rack in the hotel closet; drip-dry is better for the environment, I think.” I closed my eyes. “Plus Canadian pocket change makes no sense.”

Francis sighed. “Peplos and Chitons were really the peak of fashion, Richard, aside from the invention of the turtleneck. True silk cotton robes would have dried in two seconds in the sunlight, no Greco-Roman anybody would have ever had this issue.”

“The issue of not enough quarters to pay for their washing machines?” I joked. He nodded along seriously.

“Yes!”

“You’d be a bit underdressed for your fashion tastes in a Chiton, though.”

“My fashion tastes?” He looked up at me. I opened one eye at him.

“Francis, you dress like you’re a turn-of-the-eighteenth-century philanthropist, rich only through a generous inheritance, going to the Opera on a Sunday evening just because you’ve got to go to class at eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning and listen to Henry argue with no one in particular about how far apart the Roman Empire’s soldiers must have stood from each other.” 

Francis opened his mouth to protest, and then closed it. He went back to toying with the buttons on the dryer. His ears were red. I closed my eye and smiled. Francis kept messing with the machine for a moment.

“Hey, Richard, be my hero and go kiss a stranger on the street so we can get a Clooney.” 

“Did you mean a ‘Loonie’?” 

He looked up at me, vaguely appalled. “Is that what they’re really called? Christ, what is this, the fucking _Looney-Tunes?_ ”

I laughed so hard at that I nearly knocked myself off the top of the machine.

In the end, I refused to kiss a stranger for a Loonie, but I did briefly considered it for a Toonie instead. An older woman woman pitied us, nearly-naked, embarrassed, and wildly eccentric in the confused eyes of strangers, and eventually gave us the money for the dryer before I could stand shirtless on the street corner whistling at anyone who walked by. 

—

We accidentally ended up stealing a laundry basket from the coin-op when we walked back to the hotel. I balanced the basket on my hip and Francis walked beside me on my opposite side. I thought I would fall over if I stopped walking. Our hands brushed together, but that’s all that happened. I imagined this was what sleepwalking felt like. 

A man on the sidewalk across the street was walking ahead of us, and it didn’t worry me until I realized he had looked back at us more times than would be considered normal. From this distance, all I could see was broad shoulders, dark hair, and round gleaming glasses staring back at me. My steps slowed and Francis stopped a few paces ahead of me. He looked back, confused, while I swayed gently in that one spot. 

“Do you see him too?” I don’t know how Francis heard me because I scarcely spoke above a whisper. Francis turned where I was looking. The man had kept walking ahead of us with his face turned away. Francis could not have seen how much he resembled Henry. My heart was throbbing dully in my chest. Francis walked over to me, hand placed carefully on my shoulder, worry in his eyes.

“You’re alright, Richard?” 

“You didn’t see him?” I felt like I was being choked while I asked. “You didn’t see his face?” 

I was so tired. I knew Francis didn’t believe me, I wasn’t sure if I believed myself entirely.  
The color drained from Francis’ face and he spun around when he realized who I believed the man to be.

“Richard, that’s not him. It’s not Henry.”

My feet felt frozen to the cracked cement. I didn’t know what to say, how to stop acting so unreasonably. Apparently I had dropped the laundry basket on the sidewalk and only noticed our spilled clothes on the ground just at that moment. I stooped down to collect it again.

“Come on, we should get back to the hotel.” He leaned down with me and pulled at my hand until I was standing again. He walked backwards while coaxing me forward like a gentle trainer would to their panicked animal. The man had disappeared from my line of vision, replaced by Francis promising me that we were alone. 

—

Francis wanted to call from a payphone again, just in case, but by the time we had gotten back to the room it was ten minutes until our time scheduled call time was over. I was a bit more lucid by then, but still exhausted. Camilla was probably pacing around her living room, waiting on us to call her. As soon as we got back to our room, I set the laundry basket immediately on the floor and sat beside it on top of the ugly Baroque carpet pattern. Francis muttered “Fuck it.” under his breath. He pulled the phone down to where I was and sat in front of me, the phone placed in the middle of us.

He reversed the charges after he dialed, and we waited.

She answered after the second ring.

Francis began sharply. “Camilla--” 

“We got the letter back.” She cut Francis off almost immediately. 

“Oh?” 

“It was a bit of an effort, but Charles managed to steal it out of Julian’s desk while Henry and I held him in the hallway before class began.” It was impossible to tell what about her voice was off-putting, but Francis mouthed at me to bring him paper and a pen. I brought him my journal opened to one of the pages in the back and uncapped the ballpoint pen for him.

“It was really that easy?” He tried to sound a little surprised while he pinned the receiver against his shoulder and scribbled quickly on the page. _Something isn’t right-- sounds different._

“Oh, no, of course it wasn’t.” There was a break in her sentence, a moment too long to be a natural pause. Francis’ eyes grew large and he pointed at the receiver dramatically. “We, um, had to ask about an essay he hadn’t really assigned. I insisted we had something due the next day and that I hadn’t understood the assignment exactly. We asked about that. Is Richard still with you?” Francis thrust the phone at me. I took it carefully. 

“I’m still here, Camilla.” Francis leaned over the journal. _She’s lying to us._ underneath that, _Be cautious._ and underneath that, _She’ll change the subject._

“Oh, you sound absolutely terrible.” I almost laughed at that. A smug look flashed briefly across Francis’ face.

“The last few days have been rough, I’m sure you can imagine.” She hummed sympathetically. Somewhere, in the background of her side of the call, was a brief cough much too deep and masculine to be hers. Francis looked at me nervously. I grabbed the pen from his hand. _The cough?_ He nodded.

“Alright, Camilla?” Francis shook his head at me, trying to stop my question before it was spoken, but it was too late.

“Of course. Are you?” 

“Sure. Did Charles just get in? We knew we were calling a bit late but we had been held up.” Francis’ hands flew up to his face, heels of his thumbs pressed against his eye sockets.

“No, Charles isn’t here. Held up by what?” Francis shook his head frantically. I figured we were already too forgone to give up.

“You’re certain? I thought I heard someone else.”

For a moment, it was all deathly silent. His hands slide down to his cheeks so that Francis could watch my reactions through the gaps in his fingers. 

“Sorry for playing these games, Richard.” Of course it was Henry; who else would it have been? I had nearly forgotten the ominous lilt of his voice. Somewhere behind him, another boy, presumably Charles, had let off a colorful string of curses.

“I can’t lie and say I wasn’t disappointed, Richard.” My breath hitched.

“We won’t give you an excuse, if that’s what you’re expecting.” My voice was surprisingly steady.

“I don’t want an excuse. I am curious what you thought was going to happen, though. This well might have been the most foolhardy thing you’ve ever done. For God’s Sake, Canada? Honestly?” He sounded like he was laughing at us. 

“What were we supposed to do, Henry? Tell Julian we killed Bunny and expect him to say ‘Don’t worry! I would have done the same.’?”

“That would have been better than being a spineless fools and running away. Murder really is the sort of thing that bonds people together, but you seem dead-set on driving our little group apart, Richard.” I looked Francis in the eyes. He seemed more offended that Henry had called me ‘spineless’ than anything else implied in that sentence.

He groaned and reached for the receiver in my hands. “You can just say you think we’re idiots and that you despise us, Henry. I don’t have the patience to talk around issues with you anymore.”

Henry cleared his throat. Camilla said something, but I didn’t catch what she muttered. 

“Anyways, we solved the letter issue, no thanks to either of you. You could come home if you wanted. Julian’s worried. Francis, your mother called me asking after you.” 

I wrote _A lie._ underneath Francis' messages in the back of the journal. Perhaps not the part about Julian, but I felt like Henry was trying to lure us back to where he had this thumb over us.

“No thanks to us?” His voice rose to the point of nearly shouting. “No problem for telling you about the letter at all in the first place, Henry! Nevermind that, somehow, your fixation on this whole thing overlooked such a massive detail! Don’t jump to thank us for reminding you of the stupidest trip you ever took before it got us tossed in jail.” His chest was heaving and tears seemed to be pricking the corners of his eyes.

“Francis, watch your language. It’s not as if I don’t know where you are now, we could play cat and mouse as long as you’d like.” 

There it was. 

He knew how to find us, and the implications of what he would do when I did eventually find us wasn’t as shocking as I had expected it to be. It was petrifying. 

Francis had one hand braced against the carpet. He took the phone away from our ears.

“Still there, Francois?” I could practically see Henry grinning on the other line. He would always have the upper hand, it seemed, and we all knew it. We would never rid ourselves of him. Francis blinked at the phone a few times, and gently placed the receiver back onto it’s base. We were quiet. 

“What do we do now?” I dared to ask.

The phone rang again, answering my question for me. I flinched and Francis let out a brief, sharp scream.

It rang four times before I reached to pick it up. 

“It’s your move now, just know that.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THIS WAS SO FUN! I had so much fun, and I earnestly hope you have fun too. Thanks for sticking around to read this whole 20k beast, if you did. I appreciate it endlessly. Please try to suspend disbelief for me, especially near the end. All translations for this chapter were done in Google Translate, again, because I still don't know Greek. Do excuse me for that.
> 
> The only song mentioned in this chapter, I BELIEVE, is 'Alright' by Supergrass.

So thus began Henry’s most dangerous game. 

No one from Hampden called us again after I put the phone’s receiver down. I felt dull, like I was removed from the situation somehow now, watching the events play out from a safe distance rather than having been a key player of the entire game. Henry’s threat of coming after Francis and I was, of course, inherently terrifying, but a part of me deeply wondered how serious he had been. After all, it was just a threat, and we had enough distance between ourselves and Hampden that the chances of Henry actually acting on his word felt like it was slimming more and more as each second ticked past. Francis stood from the carpeted floor and began pacing around the room, cursing under his breath the whole time. I studied the details of the highlights upon the phone’s plastic base and wondered if we knew Henry well enough to predict his actions anymore. The sound of Francis’ steps were unevenly timed and fast enough that he nearly tripped over himself more than once.

“He’s going to kill us, Richard.”

I didn’t know exactly what to reply with, despite having been working under that same assumption for at least a week by that point. 

“He’s going to come here and kill us to make sure we don’t tell anyone. He doesn’t trust us anymore.” 

“Francis.”

“Even if he doesn’t kill us we’ll go to jail.”

“Francis.” I spoke sharper, more carefully, to enunciate the syllables in his name that time.

He stopped pacing across the room with his hands twisting nervously at his sides. He looked at me, the stress and fear detailed clearly across his face. 

“If we make a suicide pact right now, we’d at least beat him to the punch.” He glanced at me, nervous and expecting, “Do we have anything to live for at this point? Should we go kill ourselves?” 

The tone he spoke in, frantic and truly afraid, frightened me. He sounded scarcely breath away from marching down the hall to take the hotel elevator up to the roof to jump. I stood quickly to intervene. My head still felt like it was spinning. Between my poorly timed decision to stand and lunge for Francis and his messy steps around the room, we collided a bit roughly. I grabbed him by his shoulders, my palms lay flat across his biceps, forcing him to look me in eye. I was desperate to be some kind of anchor for him. 

“Francis, we are not making a suicide pact.” His expression wavered, as if he was about to cry. “We are not going to kill ourselves.” 

I felt like I was scolding a child. He nodded, slightly. His gaze fell to the floor, avoiding my eyes. Shame seemed to have rolled off of him in thick waves for even suggesting it. I took my hands off his shoulders slowly and he left to perch on the edge of the mattress. His fingers laced together tightly at the base of his skull and he leaned his elbows against the tops of his knees. I sat close at his side and curled my arm around his back. My palm rested lightly against the curve of his waist. He didn’t speak. I found myself staring at the phone sitting on the floor again

“We can’t stay here.” I decided after a few uncomfortably timed beats of silence. He nodded in agreement.

“We can’t go to Toronto either, now.” He offered in a quiet voice. He took his hands away from behind his neck and placed them flat on his knees, palms down. “What are we supposed to do?”

“Change our names and move out in the Canadian wilderness.” He chuckled at that, halfheartedly. 

“I’ll write a terrible naturalist romance novella about us and we can live in the backseat of the Mustang.”

“That’s a godawful idea.”

I rubbed delicate, careful circles into the fabric just above his hip with my thumb. “I know.”

“Maybe we’re overthinking it.” He started, his words quiet and a little unsure, but his gaze was steady when he turned to me.

“How do you mean?” 

“Why don’t we just go as far as we can and see where we end up? If we don’t have a plan anymore, and we’re really throwing everything to the wind, Henry won’t be able to figure out where we are if we don’t know where we’re going ourselves.”

It wasn’t his worst idea, truthfully. Continuing in any direction and seeing how far fate could let us go probably wasn’t even too far off from anything we would have planned otherwise. Francis leaned into my side. He was trembling and a bit too quiet. 

“Alright?” I asked after him.

“I feel sick.”

I pressed a small kiss onto the crown of his head.

—

So in the next afternoon, we packed our things and left Ottawa. We drove and drove and drove, unplanned but content for weeks on weeks until we barely remembered a life before we lived in a state of hotel rooms and mental limbo. In those few months, we never had a schedule per say, more than we did an impromptu to-do list of meaningless tasks to fill our days that we conceived in the morning and finished by mid afternoon, and an approximate amount of miles in one direction to travel. The days began to feel longer and warmer in a very stereotypical fashion. We seemed to be driving out of the in-between weather of spring’s bitter ends and summer’s easy beginnings. I no longer needed to wear Francis’ long wool coat to go out and the top of the Mustang Convertible was nearly always down to let the wind card through our hair. We felt constantly busy, driving and visiting in small cities, watching days roll past the Mustang’s windshield while the sunlight made the leather seats of the car glow coppery orange and warm. I suspect that those months were the best spent of my life; we were relatively carefree and at peace, and Francis unapologetically reminded me on the daily of the fact that we seemed to have found ourselves surreptitiously in love as well. 

The sun seemed to constantly shine, decorating Francis in a beautiful golden light at all times. His hair had grown out a bit, and we had taken up chain smoking to help long afternoons move a bit quicker. He had taken to clipping the longer, looser curls back against his the sides of his head with cheap hair-combs to keep it out of his eyes while a cigarette clung lazily to the edge of his lips. More than once he ran his fingers deftly through my hair in an unsuspecting moment and mentioned, with an admiration equal to how I felt in regards to him, how lovely the chestnut color of my own hair was. I’d grin and continue about my own business while his fingers played with my hair. I remember these months tasted like the faint hint of black tea in Francis’ mouth and the sweet taste of summer fruits, barely ripe and freshly bought from any anonymous farmer’s market we stumbled into. 

Of course, we usually had a bed paid for most nights, but we couldn’t have been so lucky all of the time. The only motel in the surrounding area of wherever the hell we had been, only possessed a grand total of five rooms, and each was occupied that night. To make due, we were pulled off to the side of a dirt road with a medium sized bottle of spiced rum I bought for us this afternoon being passed between our open palms. If we stayed up all night, then there was no need for a bed, I argued and managed to convince him. I still was barely sleeping those days so asking for his company might have been a bit selfish, but he seemed to not mind. It was warm enough in the night air that we could have the convertible roof down still. Francis was lying across the backseat on his back, his knees bent and his feet hanging over the top of the car’s back door. I was sitting on the top of the seat between the headrests, my legs resting carefully over Francis’ chest. Crickets were whistling unevenly, loudly, in the tall grass alongside the road. I was recounting some old myths about constellations to pass the time, my arms outstretched to gesticulate vaguely at the stars.

“I love you.” Francis had interrupted me mid-sentence about only ever being able to identify Orion’s Belt from my bedroom window when I was small and lived in California. My gaze fell from the sparkling heavens to his grinning face, feeling a bit speechless all of the sudden.

“Oh, you can keep talking, I just realized.” 

“You just realized that you love me?”

“Well, I’m sure I knew beforehand but it just struck me very acutely right now.” His expression was soft and genuine in a way that I liked to believe he only had when he looked at me. I cleared my throat, a bit awkwardly. Francis kept smiling up at me.

“I love you, too.” 

—

I had insisted that we stop driving for an afternoon, that we must have gone far enough for that day. Francis told me the painted lines on the roadway were making his eyes cross anyways, and we pulled off to a seemingly nameless, minuscule town. The downtown seemed to be no more than a few blocks long, but it was quaint. The entire town seemed to be split down the center by a small river, and the residents moved peacefully, as if they were in no rush at all. The buildings stood old and weathered, but proud. Francis tugged gently on my sleeve hem, and nodded towards an antique store. It’s front doors were stopped open to carry the breeze inside the building.

“Let’s poke around in there.” I held my arm out for him to lead the way. 

The store was cramped almost to the bursting point with furniture, shoeboxes of postcards, and tables filled with odds and ends. Misplaced, unmatched pieces of once silver table settings stood in precarious stacks on shelves. More than a few mechanical pieces and unfinished amateur landscape paintings were leaning against the far wall. There were several wooden crates overflowing with vinyl records. The atmosphere was comfortable despite the claustrophobic setting. We walked slowly, slithering our way through the thin footpath amongst the wares. I stumbled across a very obviously faked Greek vase, and had to listen to Francis mutter bitterly about the inaccuracies of it’s black-figure paintings. Near the back of the shop, there was a gracious amount of free space where a large, gilded glass jewelry case stood. A sleepy man with coke-bottle glasses was reading a fishing magazine on a plastic stool behind the case. He looked us over with scarcely a glance, likely deciding we looked just the right amount of scrappy and rich to not want to steal anything from the store, and promptly went back to his magazine. I could smell nauseatingly ashy, cheap cigarette smoke hanging off of him and wondered how the smell of ash and smoke could smell so different on Francis. We’d been going through a pack together every other day out of sheer boredom, but the scent was more subtle and alluring on the underside of Francis’ jaw. 

Francis had leaned over the case, peering at the rings and necklaces under the glass like a magpie, trying to look pretentious and uninterested in the beautiful shiny trinkets. I busied myself with looking over some musty smelling women's blouses a few feet away. The lace along the collars was soft to the touch and I wanted to drag my fingertips across every shirt. Francis let out a soft gasp, I turned, and he quickly motioned me to come over with a sharp flick of his wrist over his shoulder. 

“See those?” he whispered in my ear when I leaned against his back with my chin barely resting next to the collar of his shirt. His thin finger pointed at a pair of black and gold engraved rings shining dully below the glass. 

“The rings?” I asked politely.

He nodded and grinned at me. “Can you read them?”

I tried to make out the font, assuming it was English, until I recognized the familiar characters of Greek etched into the gold. They stood parallel to each other in their dark velvet container, one ring had been engraved with αξέχαστος in the dark enamel so the gold could shine through, and ανίκητος in a similar style upon the other. Silently, I translated the words as _unforgettable_ and _unbeatable_ , respectively. 

The man behind the counter spoke gruffly. “Forty-five bucks for both of ‘em. Won’t sell ‘em separately.”

“Really? Only forty-five?” Francis was practically gaping. I didn’t know much about pricing in regards to fashion (Francis had taken to buying me a few expensive summer shirts or coats in one of the more populated cities we stopped in), but even I could tell that probably wasn’t enough for the rings if they were pure gold.

“Why won’t you sell separately?” I prompted. The man’s bug-eyes thinned suspiciously behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

“What are your names? Ya’ll don’t live in town. I’d recognize you otherwise.”

“Achilles and Patroclus. We’re on vacation.” Francis told him without missing a beat. The man chuckled, harsh and gruff. I smiled at the reference and all of it’s implications.

The man finally gave in, “They’re mourning rings. Disrespectful to the dead to separate the rings. Don’t need any ghosts haunting my shop, thanks.” 

I hadn’t ever heard of mourning rings before, but Francis immediately reached for his pocketbook and gave the man a few bills in exchange for the rings before I could ask. He removed the box from the case, snapped the lid of their velvet box with a satisfying click, and handed it over into Francis’ open palms. Francis spun on his heel and nearly knocked into an uneven, wooden bookshelf with his elbow on his way out. He slipped the box into his pocket, and practically skipped out of the store before I could follow. I thanked the man and moved to follow Francis outside.

He was stopped, sitting excitedly like an eager child, at a wrought-iron bench along the sidewalk a few paces away from the antique store’s open doors. The rings were out of their box and I saw their dull shine in the sunlight when I walked over.

“Care to explain what a mourning ring is for me?”

“They were very popular in the late 1800’s, but they’ve been around for ages. People would bequeath them to their friends and family when they died as a sort of ‘momento mori’ type of thing. I always thought they were fascinating.” 

He held the rings at a strange angle, looking along the inside of the golden bands. “Look! Look, this one’s from October 1855, and the other’s from October 1856.”

“Very poetic.” I told him. “What do you suppose happened in the year apart?”

He bit his lip and thought. “Invincible died first, tragically, mind you, because they were invincible." I smiled lightly at the way he translated the phrase, but didn't interrupt. "They asked their partner to have a ring engraved. Unforgettable died from a broken heart one year later, and all of their close friends thought the whole situation was so sentimental that they had another ring made honorarily so they could keep being together. Their mutual friend, who held onto the rings, just died of natural causes recently, and they wound up in the antique shop after the estate sale, and now they belong to me.”

“Did you make that up just now?” I couldn’t help but smile. 

He nodded, grinning back at me. He had placed the rings carefully back in their box. The lid was snapped shut again and the ensemble was slipped into his coat pocket. He rose from the bench and held his hand out to me, “Want to go for a bit of a walk with me?”

—

There was a sort of cross between a park and a nature preserve that wound around the river that cut through the town. We found a bridge with crumbling, mossy stone steps that slowly led us downwards into the groomed portion of the park. It was just before dusk, and the sun was setting slowly between the cracks of the trees that surrounded us. We stopped walking for whatever reason, so Francis could look across the river, I believe. His profile was stunning. My pulse was delicate and steady beneath the soft skin of my wrists. I reached across the short distance between him and I to lace our fingers together. He looked at me with a familiar smile. Soft, and genuine.

“Just felt like it.” I muttered as an excuse, in case he had been wondering. I felt flushed beneath his affectionate gaze.

Then, very quickly, his face was close to mine. He placed one of his hands, the one I wasn’t holding, solidly against the small of my back and leaned forward. This wasn’t the first time he had caught me in an unexpected kiss but it was the first time I found myself pleasantly surprised that I kissed back on reflex. I put my free hand flat and warm against his chest, just below his collarbones. My fingertips brushed against the bare skin beneath his shirt collar. It was long and sweet and bordering on lurid. When he finally pulled away, I leaned down kiss at the delicate skin of his neck below his jawline.

“Richard. Richard, stop for a moment. Hold on.” 

He leaned his forehead into my shoulder and reached around in his pocket with his free hand until he had fished out the velvet box successfully. He stood up straight and let out a deep, nervous breath. Our hands, still laced together in the odd, slightly unfitting fashion that they always seemed to be, were pulled up by Francis’ arm so as to let him kiss the back of my knuckles. The golden flecks in his irises had caught the sparse sunlight in the loveliest way.

“You’re going to have one of the rings, alright? I decided I want you to wear one.” Our hands fell apart. I nodded dully, agreeing with his decision wholeheartedly. His hand, still soft, somehow, and elegantly defined, trembled as it slipped the ring onto my left hand.

 _Oh_ , I had realized, _he’s proposing to you_ , as if was the most commonplace situation I had ever been in. 

“It’s a bit untraditional and perhaps a bit too soon, I admit, but we couldn’t have done anything officially anyways, I think, if we ever did. So this is the next best option.” His words came out a touch more eagerly than I’m sure he had meant them to sound.

“You’re proposing to me.” It was less of a question at this point and closer to a statement of confirmation. He nodded quickly, ducking his head bashfully. I hadn’t even considered the idea that Francis was capable of being so reluctant looking. 

“It seems right.” He had been speaking so, so softly. His voice was bright and sweet, like a teaspoon of honey that collected at the bottom of a tea mug; surprising and saccharine, but certainly not unwelcome. 

I nodded, and found myself mumbling back at him, “Who could either of us end up with after all of this is done, anyways?”

The ring was a snug around the base of my first knuckle when he put it on my hand. The engraving glittered up at me, _Unbeatable_. I hadn’t noticed before then, the intricacies of the curling detail work that had delicately been carved along the golden trim of the ring. 

The ring was beautiful and a little morbid for my tastes, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential life of growing old and domestic with Francis. I thought about us getting a mortgage for our home, about finishing my degree through some kind of miracle, about becoming a professor at a university somewhere to pay off that mortgage, about perhaps owning a cat, about waltzing across our living room floor in the evenings to songs we barely knew, about knowing every detail of the ceiling above our bed, about the way Francis had looked at me after my nightmare, about the first time we had kissed in front of my dorm closet.

My hands quickly moved of their own accord to remove the other ring from the velvet box in Francis’ palm. I finished the exchange by putting on the matching ring on his slender finger for him. 

Francis let out a brief sob of an exhale, and a deep laugh, before he tossed himself into my arms and we fell backwards until my shoulders fell against the trunk of a tree. He kissed me in the setting sunlight and refused to stop until I could barely see him in front of me in early evening’s darkness.

—

Being married in a very questionably legal way was quite fun, I found, having only been so for about three or four hours at that point. Much of the timeframe had been spent kissing in the woods in the dark, which was always a riot, before we both agreed, wholeheartedly and breathlessly, that we had to go get drunk. It couldn’t have been earlier than eleven, but we stopped in a 24 hour party store. It all felt a bit liminal but we bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate with. (“We’re just on our way to a wedding after-party.” I offered to the bitter woman behind the register.) A familiar, catchy song about getting by and feeling alright played out of a scratchy plastic radio on the counter while we paid, but the name of the musician eluded me at the time. I kept grinning, giddy like a madman, every time I saw the flash of gold or the creamy black enamel stand out proudly against Francis’ third knuckle. He shoved me playfully in the shoulder while we walked back to the motel and tell me to stop staring so much. The champagne’s foil, cold and sweating, crinkled and poked into the palm of my hand while we walked. It was late enough and lonely enough on the sidewalk that we were the only souls out and awake besides the singing insects in the grass. Francis pressed happily into my side and slid his arm around my waist while we walked, his hand sliding down into one back pocket of my trousers casually.

We had been staying in that particular motel for about a week, which was by and far much longer than we typically had stayed anywhere. It was beginning to feel comfortable, broaching on well lived in, rather than the temporary home it was meant to be. We kicked our shoes off at the door and undid the top buttons of our shirt collars. Francis popped the champagne and sent the cork flying across the room with our laughter bouncing off the walls. We drank the champagne gladly from stout tumbler glasses that came along with the room near the sink in the bathroom and ate strawberries I bought on sale the day before from a green plastic basket. We barely moved off the bed or really that far away from each other. At some point we were both half naked, stripped and unaware of what happened to our shirts but certainly aware of where we put our cups, feeling blind drunk and giddy as hell. I was on the floor and Francis was on the mattress, leaning over the edge. He was laying on his stomach with his arms wrapped fondly around my neck while I leaned against the bed. He was giggling in my ear, begging me to come up to lie with him in English and Greek again. I slipped on the empty bottle as it rolled around near my feet when I moved to lie down. Quite literally, I tripped into his arms. He caught me, gracefully, before he roughly rolled me onto the mattress with an easy laugh and a devilish smile. His hands were tickling the waist of my trousers and he licked his way down to my neck, purring in my ear the whole time that it really was fun, he promised, if I was feeling up to it. I nodded dumbly, nervous and eager, and relatively unwise in the exact way these things would work. Francis’ smile was lustful and intoxicating, his eyes smokey and lewd, and he took the lead before ducking his head down.

—

We kept moving around, of course. We couldn’t have stayed in one motel forever, but it wasn’t until we were back on American soil things started getting dodgy again; we were somewhere in Michigan’s upper peninsula, I believe, or perhaps back onto the mainland on the other side of the Mackinac Bridge. I thought I was seeing Henry again, and found myself anxiously grabbing at Francis’ hand almost on an hourly basis. Francis seemed so sad, so understanding during these instances over coffee or a meal or waiting for traffic to clear and always offered a quick excuse for us to leave wherever we had been. He did his best to reassure me, murmuring that there was no way Henry could know where we were, that we were as safe as safe could be. Yet the unmistakeable slope of Henry’s shoulders and his stoic presence seemed to be stalking us, always lurking in my peripheral vision, constant but just out of sight.

It wasn’t until we arrived at our latest hotel room to find the door cracked open just the slightest bit that Francis seemed to understand my paranoia. We didn’t know what to do. My hand dully slipped against Francis’ palm, and nodded at me. One of his slender fingers gently touched his top lip in the universal sign of ‘don’t make any noise’.

Somehow the door was pushed open, surely by one of our hands and sure as anything, Henry was in the room. For a second, I nearly laughed at the unlikelihood of it all. He seemed like a ghost at this point, rather than a real person who stepped into our world so inexplicably, so suddenly. He was sitting carefully composed on the edge of our bed flipping through my thin journal that had become so worn and creased in its spine and pages over the past months as I filled the pages with poetic renditions of our castaway life. Some part of him, perhaps the way he had carried himself now, sloppier and a touch unsettled, like a murderous villain who had no concept of human emotions anymore, scared me enough that I found myself briefly unable to move. 

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” His tone was clinical and empty. 

I was breathing hard through my nose, my breath whistling slightly. I let go of Francis’ hand and walked across the room. Francis stayed near the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” Francis asked, spitting the question out like a mouthful of poison.

Henry put my journal down and picked something up and off the mattress from his side. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I recognized it as the same gun we had practiced shooting with at Francis’ home in Vermont so long ago, clasped lazily in his right hand. 

“Henry, put that away.” I told him, nervous to be demanding anything of anyone with a gun. He barked out a cruel laugh. 

Francis continued my halfheartedly plea for me. “What good would it serve you to kill us now, after things were finally settling?”

“Things never settled, you absolute fools!” His eyes dashed across the room, spanning the distance between Francis and I. Henry’s grasp tightened and his voice grew more ragged with every word. His arm lifted quickly as it the gun weighed nothing at all in his palm or on his conscience. "It's been a fucking train-wreck!"

“You’ve no idea how everything fell apart while you were galavanting around!” His hand began to shake while he aimed at me. I would love to have said I was staring down the barrel of Henry’s gun, but my eyes had been desperately swept towards where Francis stood across the room. 

I took a hesitant step towards them both, and that was enough to push Henry over the unspoken line that had been holding him back. There were two sharp bangs, loud enough to leave my ears ringing just enough that I couldn’t understand what Francis had screamed, if he did say anything intelligent. Two distinct burning sensations in my chest were very apparent to me while I watched Henry’s arm fall, the gun lowered. I hadn’t even stumbled backwards until I looked down and saw the small blurs of crimson in my shirt that hadn’t been there before.

For most of my life, I could usually tell how something would feel, a sort of pain intuition, I suppose. However, I had absolutely no idea what being shot was going to have felt like. It burned more than I would have assumed. All of the air in my lungs had been knocked out of me, and I stumbled backwards, gasping and spluttering unattractively, until I tripped against the window panes. The glass crunched beneath the impact of my weight of my skull cracking against it. There was a white, burning pain below my right collarbone and the hot sensation of something having churned my lower gut organs around inside of me. I gasped for air, desperate to find the ease of breathing again, but the muscles in my chest refused to expand and my lungs remained painfully empty. It felt as if I could only manage to exhale over and over until there was nothing left to cough up besides a sad, garbled wheeze of pain. Francis lunged across the room, elbowing past the dangerous position of Henry carelessly, and dived directly towards me when I slumped against the floor. My head lolled around uselessly before knocking on the plaster wall behind me. I saw, then, that the window panes had created a spiderweb of fractures and splinters that threatened to break out of place at any moment above me, looking like a broken halo of glass. Francis’ hands were warm and solid when he cupped them against the sides of my neck. He kissed me, chaste and quick, once on the lips, once on my cheek, once on my forehead. Behind us, I was vaguely aware of how Henry scoffed, condescending and a little surprised, which confused me. If he had been reading my journal, could he really have been surprised by a few, miserable kisses?

The edges of my vision were starting to go blurred and glassy. The pain below my collarbone was excruciating. Francis’ swift hands were trembling so severely then that he barely managed to keep them in one spot to apply pressure against my wound. Francis was muttering manic, panicked lines of nothing while his soft, delicate fingers grew slick with my blood. I saw how the gold of his ring still glittered underneath the dark stains. It was almost comical how fast I was bleeding; I figured the bullet must have nicked my Carotid artery, perhaps had shot right through it. What a predicament that would have put me in. The blood pulsed out of my wounds in morbid waves, thick as a syrup, while staining the front of my shirt at two points. The cotton fabric wicked the blood until it was soaked through entirely in the front and stuck uncomfortably against my chest. I could breathe all at once, suddenly, as if my muscles finally remembered what their job was. I had difficulty exhaling, and had to keep it restricted to about a fourth the size of a normal breath or else I felt like I was going to die from the pain of it alone.

“He fucking _shot me._ ” I managed to cough out.

Francis nodded uselessly while his palms pressed painfully against the two wounds, “Don’t talk okay, darling, don’t speak. It’ll be alright.”

I suppose blacking out from pain with Francis’ face taking up my entire frame of vision would have likely been as ideal as the situation could have gotten, but I rarely got what I wanted. His hands, shiny red and streaked with beady lines of my blood gravitating down his forearms, peeled away from my bullet hole after he spoke. 

In a matter of seconds he was busy knocking Henry to the floor with his shoulder. Henry was notably a taller and more muscular man than Francis or myself, but somehow, miraculously, Francis had him pinned against the ground, one knee planted against his sternum, before delivering a few punches to Henry’s face. The gun clattered loudly to the floor behind Henry. I don’t know how the rest of their fight went because I lost consciousness as Francis’ arm, pulled back and poised for another hit, hovered in the air when Henry’s face rolled to the side. Francis turned to look desperately at me while clambering off Henry’s chest. The room spun into a dark vertigo while I slipped off the wall and collapsed against the floorboards completely.

—

I suspect someone else in the hotel had called for an ambulance at the sound of gunfire, because I don’t have any recollection of Francis doing so, or Henry being conscious enough to do such a kind favor for me.

The ride to the hospital felt impossibly long and even more uncomfortable. Two nurses, one woman and one man rushed around my sides, forcing me to cling to whatever consciousness I had left. Francis was there was well, of course he was, staring pale and worried blind over the sight of me, soaked in my own blood and barely alive on a gurney. He was warm, so warm, and glowing underneath the lights in the back of the ambulance. I reached up weakly, cupping his cheek, desperately putting all remaining energy into telling him something poetic, something beautiful, something to bring a smile to his face, something good to end it all on. His hand, his ring, gently covered my hand against his face.

“Francis,” Tears immediately began spilling over his dark eyelashes. He was so, so pretty and I hadn’t told him that enough.

“Francis, you know I adore you. You’re really unforgettable.” He nodded, up and down up and down quickly. “And I would love to go to bed with you.”

He was quiet, his eyebrows pinched together in confusion, until he recalled what I meant and let out an ugly noise, a bark somewhere between his honey-sweet laugh and a sob of pain so acute it identically mirrored how I felt.

He leaned down, taking up much of the space over me that the nurses were desperate to have, and kissed me. He still tasted like the subtle ash from our cigarettes and a black tea we had that morning. When he leaned up and away, his soft hands brushed the sweat-soaked hair out of my eyes, I was so cold I thought I was trembling. Suddenly, then, it was easy, like relaxing a muscle, and I slipped away from it all, never quite finding my way back, but glad it all had ended with him smiling at me, soft and genuine, but endlessly sad this time around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully the ending was clear enough, and if it wasn't, that you'll forgive me for absolutely running out of any conceivable explanations for Henry's arrival and skirting around that issue pretty blatantly. If not, please absolutely feel free to critique this chapter to hell and back and tell me what you didn't like. 
> 
> I'm planning another Richard/Francis fic soon(-ish) and I promise it is sooooo much more pleasant than this one was. It'll be shorter as well, because this was such a fucking haul for everyone involved, myself especially.
> 
> Thank you again, it means a ton to my sensitive little heart that anyone was interested in this adventure at all. I mean it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Sydney, my favorite local TSH enthusiast, for making me read the book at all in the first place.
> 
> This is my first time writing anything like this, but I'm definitely writing this for entirely for myself at this point. I'd appreciate supportive feedback if anyone wants me to keep putting energy into making it suitable for public consumption.


End file.
